January 17, 2021
Pakistan’s Political Economy is a collection of eleven pieces, inspired by an article in the EPW on state and Alavian thesis
Hamza Alavi wrote about Pakistan being an “overdeveloped” state in 1972 in the
New Left Review. Does his argument still hold? To look into this question, it is worthwhile to revisit arguments in the above-mentioned book. It has been inspired by Zaidi’s 2014 article in the EPW on state and Alavian thesis. The book has eleven chapters written by well-established relatively young scholars and a detailed introduction by Matthew McCartney and S Akbar Zaidi. Chapters range from the social sciences and the overdeveloped state in Pakistan to overdeveloped Alavian legacy, institutions, women and Islam, the amnesia of genesis, uneven state-spatiality, class structure, agrarian transformation, bazaar traders, democracy-patronage debate and media transformations.